INTERVIEW: ‘Rocktopia’ marries classical music with classic rock
Photo: Máiréad Nesbitt and Rob Evan star in Rocktopia. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by show’s PR agent with permission.
Broadway singer Rob Evan has helped co-create a unique musical evening that marries two genres not often found side by side: classical music and classic rock. Rocktopia, the brainchild of Evan and fellow co-creator Randall Craig Fleischer, played a limited Broadway engagement earlier in the year, and now they are touring the show in the coming days.
Rocktopia, with special guest Dee Snider from Twisted Sister, will play Thursday, Oct. 18 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, New Jersey. Other dates take the team to New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio through Oct. 27.
Evan is enthused over the success of Rocktopia because for the first time in his career he is bringing together his two musical loves. The singer has appeared on Broadway in Jekyll & Hyde, Les Misérables and Tarzan. His leading man roles led to much recognition and the freedom to pursue his other interests.
For Rocktopia, Evan promises audiences “a very unique classical, rock ‘n’ roll concert experience.”
He added: “It’s something that we feel nobody has really done, which is really, truly fuse classical music with classic rock ‘n’ roll because our whole idea was if Beethoven or Mozart were alive today, they’d be rock stars. They would have probably utilized the electric technology that we have, and I think the inverse is, too. If Freddie Mercury or Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey or Jimmy Page and Robert Plant lived hundreds of years ago, that the same thing would exist. So we found this commonality between these two genres.”
Evan, who also sings in the show, has been working on this project for a long time. He was classically trained as an opera singer, but deep down, he always wanted to be a rock star. To satisfy both genres in this eternal tug of war, he became a Broadway star in contemporary musicals like Jekyll & Hyde (he performed more than 1,000 times in the title roles).
“This was a brainchild of mine and my co-creator, Randy Fleischer, who is a well-known conductor around the country,” Evan said. “He is the musical director of three symphonies, and we’ve done a lot of work in the symphony world. And we found as we were going out there doing pops concerts — as I was being flown around to sing the stuff that I was known for on Broadway and then some rock ‘n’ roll — that we weren’t really challenging the symphony artists. But yet it was still paying their bills, so we brought in the real classical, heavy classical stuff and started testing that. And the concertmasters would come up to us and go, ‘Thank you so much because this is what I was trained to play, but it also is successful for our symphonies.’ It’s been brewing for a long time.”
Evan still counts Rocktopia as the new kid on the block, and he admitted that there has been hesitation throughout the entire process. There are stigmas about rock ‘n’ roll and classical music that sometimes create barriers for people to appreciate both. Evan hopes to knock down these barriers.
“There’s always hesitation because I’m a purist as well,” he said. “I love my [Ludwig van] Beethoven in its purest form, or [Igor] Stravinsky or [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart or [Pyotr Ilyich] Tchaikovsky, so I knew that was going to be an issue. But we did a conceptual outing in 2012 at the Youngstown Symphony when my co-creator, Randall Fleischer, and I just started going, ‘OK, we’ve got an idea here.’”
The initial audiences enjoyed the experience, so Evan and the team saw a path forward. Still, they were traveling down a long road. For starters, even explaining Rocktopia to newbies can be difficult. Here’s how the official website defines the concert: a rule-busting multimedia extravaganza with five world-class singers backed by a full symphony orchestra, rock band and powerhouse choir.
“The good thing is now we’ve done what we said we were going to do, and people now understand what it is,” he said. “We’ve gotten a lot of affirmations, which is really cool, from rock stars that participated on Broadway. Pat Monahan [of Train] was so generous in loving what we created. Dee Snider is now a part of the band and will be on all of our dates in the fall on tour. Robert Zander from Cheap Trick. … These are my childhood heroes.”
He added: “I have to pinch myself a lot these days because I text and have phone calls and conversations with these people that are going, ‘Rob, we see your vision.’ I’m just a Broadway guy. I’m pinching myself a lot these days, but it’s cool because I do think we’re on to something. They see it as well.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Rocktopia will play Thursday, Oct. 18 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, New Jersey. Click here for more information and tickets.
